TODAY is the day where we are reminded why we're the greatest country on Earth.

As many of us enjoy a barbie with friends and family we will exemplify the very qualities that make us a nation of dead set bloody legends, and it's our core beliefs that make us so great.

We believe in sacrifice, like when we "sacrifice" the first snag on the hotplate instead of cleaning the BBQ by hygienic methods. Like when we "sacrifice" a can of beer on the hotplate to marinate the sliced onions. Or perhaps when your wife's spinster dragon of a sister needs a date for a wedding you "sacrifice" your best mate. We understand sacrifice.

We are a land of opportunity. Where else could Ken Done be considered an artist? Where else could Warwick Capper release an album? Where else could someone who repeated Year 11 and is sailing perilously close to illiteracy be asked to write a column for a national publisher on what makes a country great?

We are a nation of sporting demigods. We don't even need to try to be good, it just comes to us! We can take an overweight, chain-smoking, baked bean addict and turn him into the best bowler in the world. We then go one step further and pull him a date with a Hollywood movie star, all while maintaining the same 90s haircut through three decades.

Australian demigod: Shane Warne.Source: Splash News Australia

We are a land of equality. Even our rich and powerful have an occasional punch up in their tracky dacks just like the rest of us.

We enjoy our freedom of speech. From Captain Arthur Phillip to Edmund Barton from Malcolm Fraser to Tony Abbott, there's always been a free voice to yell "Hey mate, you're a bloody tool!" Our total lack of respect for authority is as intrinsic as our ability to "pull a sickie" when we're hung-over.

We defend our right to bare arms. Ever taken a Virgin flight to the Gold Coast? It's all singlets and tank tops! Although I personally think sleeves are appropriate for air travel, I will defend to the death your right to wear Rip Curl.

Australia is one of the worlds great democracies. When someone says "I reckon we should pack up the tools and hit the pub" and everyone else agrees, that's democracy in action! Or when your wife says " We're going to the parent teacher meeting" and you say "I think I've got a case of gastro" ... OK, that's probably not democracy but it's still pretty Aussie.

I'm at risk of hyperbole so let's not over state our achievements, it's not like we invented sliced bread. We did one better and invented sliced beetroot! Then what did we do? Put it in hamburgers! Who saw that coming? Not bloody Europe I tell you that much! While we're at it, we invented chicken salt and if we didn't we sure act like we did! Chicken salt took the ordinary chip and turned it into a super star in the same way Damir Dokic did for Jelena Dokic but with more success.

A burger without beetroot would be like hot chips without chicken salt....Un-Australian!Source: News Limited

Look we're not without fault though, admittedly we still have a bit to work on. The other day a bloke was arrested for driving an unlicensed mechanical esky that he'd built himself. So we're still making mistakes — clearly the officer was unaware of how awesome a motorised esky is — but we're a young nation and we're all still learning.

Enjoy this Australia Day but remember, we're lucky enough to have 365 of them a year!

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has branded the I.S murder of a Japanese hostage as 'outrageous and unforgivable'.

THE distraught father of a Japanese hostage believed executed by his militant Islamist captors has told how his mind had gone "totally blank" when he heard the news of his son's death.

"I thought 'Ah, this has finally happened' and was filled with regret," Shoichi Yukawa said just hours after a video appeared online claiming that his son Haruna Yukawa, 42, had been executed.

"I went totally blank, I was only sorry ... I had no words to say," the 74-year-old said.

The announcement of Haruna Yukawa's death came days after the Islamic State group published a video in which it threatened to kill him and freelance journalist Kenji Goto unless Japan paid a $US200 million ($252 million) ransom within 72 hours.

That deadline passed on Friday, with Tokyo saying it was still making frantic efforts to contact the jihadists.

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Heartache ... Shoichi Yukawa (right, in blue), father of Haruna Yukawa, said his mind went blank when he found out his son was murdered. Picture: AFP/Yasuhiro SugimotoSource: AFP

Late Saturday a three-minute video was released showing a still image of Goto holding a photograph of a decapitated body said to be Yukawa.

In the accompanying audio recording, a man claiming to be Goto blames Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe for Yukawa's killing, and demands the release of an Iraqi woman sentenced to death in Jordan for her part in multiple bombings.

Shoichi Yukawa on Sunday repeatedly apologised to Goto, who had travelled to Syria to try to free his son.

"We are very sorry for causing trouble" to the public as well as to Goto, the father said.

"We are deeply grateful that the government and others concerned have made their utmost efforts."

The father said his son had felt as if Goto, 47, was his "big brother".

"My son told me all the time that he is a sincere, very courageous and gentle man. I feel it very painful that Mr Goto worried about Haruna, went there and risked his own life and then was kidnapped and threatened this way," he said.

"I had been hoping something like this wouldn't happen, but it finally did. If I could see him again, I would hug him with all my strength."

Heartbroken ... Junko Ishido, mother of Japanese journalist Kenji Goto who was taken hostage by the Islamic State group, reacts during a press conference in Tokyo. Picture: AP Photo/Koji SasaharaSource: AP

Japan PM: 'Outrageous and unforgivable act of terrorism'

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has branded the murder of a Japanese hostage by Islamic State militants as "outrageous and unforgivable" and demanded the immediate release of a second captive, amid growing global revulsion.

"Such an act of terrorism is outrageous and unforgivable," Abe told broadcaster NHK on Sunday.

Outraged ... Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo branded the murder of a Japanese hostage by Islamic State militants as 'outrageous and unforgivable'. Picture: AFP/Yoshikazu TsunoSource: Supplied

US President Barack Obama led the worldwide condemnation of what he called the Islamic State group's "brutal murder" of Yukawa.

Obama, who arrived in New Delhi on Sunday for a three-day visit, telephoned Abe from the Indian capital "to offer condolences for the murder ... of Japanese citizen Haruna Yukawa and to convey solidarity with the Japanese people", said a White House statement.

Crowds have gathered to congratulate 2015's Australian of the Year award winners.

AUSTRALIAN of the Year Rosie Batty admitted receiving the nation's top honour was bittersweet — she would rather­ have her son.

Ms Batty was honoured in a glittering ceremony on the steps of Parliament House last night, but her boy, Luke, who was killed last February by his father in an act of violence, was never far from her thoughts.

"I love you buddy. I miss him every moment of every day," Ms Batty said. "I think of him every single second and I dream about him and I can't bring him back so this helps me. It helps me."

"For me to see his friends growing up and changing so quickly ... I'm thrilled that they are, but it's a dagger in the heart too.

"I think to myself 'gee am I always going to feel like this?'

The Australian of the Year for 2015 Rosie Batty from Victoria and Prime Minister Tony Abbott during the Australian of the Year Awards ceremony at Parliament House in Canberra.

"But you make the time that you have and you fill it with as much happy times as you can."

Ms Batty vowed to use her new title to fight against domestic violence. "I'm thrilled to get the award. It gives me a stronger platform, a greater voice and determination to make this year as Australian of the Year really mean something."

The 52-year-old was part of history as last night marked the first time in the awards' 55-year history that all four major honours went to women.

Author Jackie French won senior Australian, deaf leader Drisana Levitzke-Gray won young Australian and GIVIT founder Juliette Wright won Australia's local hero.

Luke Batty who was killed by his father Greg Anderson

Ms Batty left her home in The Midlands, England at 24, before journeying to Australia and meeting the father of her son Luke, Greg Anderson.

The pair split as Anderson's mental state became increasingly volatile and he threatened and assaulted her.

In the months since Luke's death, Ms Batty has put her personal grief to one side to launch a one-woman crusade against domestic violence.

Last night she described a "serious epidemic across our nation" with one in three women and one in four children experiencing domestic violence­.

Chairman of the National Australia Day Council Ben Robert-Smith VC, MG hugging the Australian of the Year for 2015 Rosie Batty.

"The statistics are unacceptable, indisputable and, if they did happen on our streets, there would be a public outcry," she said.

"I am on a path to expose family violence and to ensure that victims receive the respect­, support and safety that they deserve."

She appealed to the government and community for support.

Prime Minister Abbott said: "You inspire all of us to be better Australians. Australia honours you and we thank you for your courage, achievement and determination."

Victoria Police commissioner Ken Lay said: " She has made us a better community, she has made us a safe country. We all owe her a lot."

AFL star and 2014 Australian of the Year Adam Goodes paid tribute to this year's nominees and left the door open to a career in politics after footy.

OTHER AWARDS:

Senior Australian of the Year author — Jackie French

Senior Australian of the Year Jackie French (Photo by Stefan Postles/Getty Images)Source: Getty Images

Young Australian of the Year deaf leader — Drisana Levitzke-Gray

Young Australian of the Year Drisana Levitzke-Gray (Photo by Stefan Postles/Getty Images)Source: Getty Images

Drug addictions could come from places you didn't expect.Source: Supplied

IT IS now one hundred years since drugs were first banned — and all through this long century of waging war on drugs, we have been told a story about addiction by our teachers and by our governments.

This story is so deeply ingrained in our minds that we take it for granted. It seems obvious. It seems manifestly true.

Until I set off three and a half years ago on a 30,000-mile journey for my new book, Chasing The Scream: The First And Last Days of the War on Drugs, to figure out what is really driving the drug war, I believed it too. But what I learned on the road is that almost everything we have been told about addiction is wrong — and there is a very different story waiting for us, if only we are ready to hear it.

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If we truly absorb this new story, we will have to change a lot more than the drug war. We will have to change ourselves.

I learned it from an extraordinary mixture of people I met on my travels.

From the surviving friends of Billie Holiday, who helped me to learn how the founder of the war on drugs stalked and helped to kill her.

From a Jewish doctor who was smuggled out of the Budapest ghetto as a baby, only to unlock the secrets of addiction as a grown man.

From a transsexual crack dealer in Brooklyn who was conceived when his mother, a crack-addict, was raped by his father, an NYPD officer.

From a man who was kept at the bottom of a well for two years by a torturing dictatorship, only to emerge to be elected President of Uruguay and to begin the last days of the war on drugs.

The war on drugs consumes South America.Source: Supplied

I had a quite personal reason to set out for these answers. One of my earliest memories as a kid is trying to wake up one of my relatives, and not being able to.

Ever since then, I have been turning over the essential mystery of addiction in my mind — what causes some people to become fixated on a drug or a behaviour until they can't stop?

How do we help those people to come back to us? As I got older, another of my close relatives developed a cocaine addiction, and I fell into a relationship with a heroin addict.

I guess addiction felt like home to me.

If you had asked me what causes drug addiction at the start, I would have looked at you as if you were an idiot, and said: "Drugs. Duh." It's not difficult to grasp. I thought I had seen it in my own life.

We can all explain it. Imagine if you and I and the next twenty people to pass us on the street take a really potent drug for twenty days.

There are strong chemical hooks in these drugs, so if we stopped on day twenty-one, our bodies would need the chemical.

We would have a ferocious craving.

We would be addicted.

That's what addiction means.

One of the ways this theory was first established is through rat experiments — ones that were injected into the American psyche in the 1980s, in a famous advert by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America.

Rats in a cage: Pic: AP Photo/Science.Source: AP

You may remember it.

The experiment is simple.

Put a rat in a cage, alone, with two water bottles. One is just water. The other is water laced with heroin or cocaine.

Almost every time you run this experiment, the rat will become obsessed with the drugged water, and keep coming back for more and more, until it kills itself.

The advert explains: "Only one drug is so addictive, nine out of ten laboratory rats will use it. And use it. And use it. Until dead. It's called cocaine. And it can do the same thing to you."

But in the 1970s, a professor of Psychology in Vancouver called Bruce Alexander noticed something odd about this experiment.

The rat is put in the cage all alone.

It has nothing to do but take the drugs.

What would happen, he wondered, if we tried this differently?

So Professor Alexander built Rat Park.

It is a lush cage where the rats would have coloured balls and the best rat-food and tunnels to scamper down and plenty of friends: everything a rat about town could want.

What, Alexander wanted to know, will happen then?

In Rat Park, all the rats obviously tried both water bottles, because they didn't know what was in them. But what happened next was startling.

The rats with good lives didn't like the drugged water.

They mostly shunned it, consuming less than a quarter of the drugs the isolated rats used. None of them died. While all the rats who were alone and unhappy became heavy users, none of the rats who had a happy environment did.

At first, I thought this was merely a quirk of rats, until I discovered that there was — at the same time as the Rat Park experiment — a helpful human equivalent taking place. It was called the Vietnam War.

Time magazine reported using heroin was "as common as chewing gum" among US soldiers, and there is solid evidence to back this up: some 20 per cent of U.S. soldiers had become addicted to heroin there, according to a study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry.

Many people were understandably terrified; they believed a huge number of addicts were about to head home when the war ended.

But in fact some 95 per cent of the addicted soldiers — according to the same study — simply stopped. Very few had rehab.

They shifted from a terrifying cage back to a pleasant one, so didn't want the drug any more.

Could addiction caused by too much partying?Source: AFP

Professor Alexander argues this discovery is a profound challenge both to the right-wing view that addiction is a moral failing caused by too much hedonistic partying, and the liberal view that addiction is a disease taking place in a chemically hijacked brain. In fact, he argues, addiction is an adaptation.

It's not you.

It's your cage.

After the first phase of Rat Park, Professor Alexander then took this test further.

He reran the early experiments, where the rats were left alone, and became compulsive users of the drug.

He let them use for fifty-seven days — if anything can hook you, it's that. Then he took them out of isolation, and placed them in Rat Park.

He wanted to know, if you fall into that state of addiction, is your brain hijacked, so you can't recover? Do the drugs take you over? What happened is — again — striking. The rats seemed to have a few twitches of withdrawal, but they soon stopped their heavy use, and went back to having a normal life.

The good cage saved them. (The full references to all the studies I am discussing are in the book.)

When I first learned about this, I was puzzled. How can this be?

This new theory is such a radical assault on what we have been told that it felt like it could not be true. But the more scientists I interviewed, and the more I looked at their studies, the more I discovered things that don't seem to make sense — unless you take account of this new approach.

Pill addiction could be caused by social crowds, rather than the substance itself.Source: Getty Images

Here's one example of an experiment that is happening all around you, and may well happen to you one day.

If you get run over today and you break your hip, you will probably be given diamorphine, the medical name for heroin.

In the hospital around you, there will be plenty of people also given heroin for long periods, for pain relief.

The heroin you will get from the doctor will have a much higher purity and potency than the heroin being used by street-addicts, who have to buy from criminals who adulterate it.

So if the old theory of addiction is right — it's the drugs that cause it; they make your body need them — then it's obvious what should happen.

Loads of people should leave the hospital and try to score smack on the streets to meet their habit.

But here's the strange thing: It virtually never happens.

As the Canadian doctor Gabor Mate was the first to explain to me, medical users just stop, despite months of use.

The same drug, used for the same length of time, turns street-users into desperate addicts and leaves medical patients unaffected.

If you still believe — as I used to — that addiction is caused by chemical hooks, this makes no sense. But if you believe Bruce Alexander's theory, the picture falls into place.

The street-addict is like the rats in the first cage, isolated, alone, with only one source of solace to turn to.

The medical patient is like the rats in the second cage. She is going home to a life where she is surrounded by the people she loves.

The drug is the same, but the environment is different.

This gives us an insight that goes much deeper than the need to understand addicts.

Professor Peter Cohen argues that human beings have a deep need to bond and form connections.

It's how we get our satisfaction.

If we can't connect with each other, we will connect with anything we can find — the whirr of a roulette wheel or the prick of a syringe.

He says we should stop talking about 'addiction' altogether, and instead call it 'bonding.'

A heroin addict has bonded with heroin because she couldn't bond as fully with anything else.

So the opposite of addiction is not sobriety.

It is human connection.

This article was originally published on the Huffington Post.

The full story of Johann Hari's journey — told through the stories of the people he met — can be read in Chasing The Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, published by Bloomsbury. The book has been praised by everyone from Elton John to Glenn Greenwald to Naomi Klein. You can buy it at all good bookstores and read more at www.chasingthescream.com

Reovery ... military personnel load a bodybag containing what is believed to be a victim of AirAsia QZ 8501 onto a helicopter on the deck of Indonesian Navy ship KRI Banda Aceh in the Java Sea. Picture: AP Photo/Natanael PohanSource: AP

A total of 70 bodies have been discovered from Flight 8501, which crashed on December 28 with 162 people on board while flying from Indonesia's second largest city of Surabaya, to Singapore.

Wreckage ... the second attempt to lift the fuselage of the crashed AirAsia jetliner has failed after a rope linking the lifting balloons broke. Picture: AP Photo/BASARNASSource: AFP

Dozens of navy divers have been fighting strong current and poor visibility while trying to lift the fuselage from 30-metre-deep waters in the Java Sea.

The cockpit has been located about 500 metres away, and the bodies of the pilot and co-pilot are believed to be there.

Bad weather is a suspected factor in the crash. The pilots asked for permission to climb to a higher altitude, but air traffic controllers couldn't allow it because of heavy air traffic. The flight disappeared soon afterwards.

Transportation authorities have ruled out sabotage and say a preliminary accident report is expected to be submitted to the International Civil Aviation Organisation this coming week.